Meg Withgott

Meg recently co-founded Panafold, the knowledge attraction company. A Ph.D. in linguistics, and an inventor with 17 U.S. patents, she is co-author of Computational Models of American Speech and author of diverse technical and scholarly papers in electrical engineering, computer science, and the humanities. She has been a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University and a Resident Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.

Meg has spent her career in Silicon Valley where she is known for innovation she led at Xerox PARC, Interval Research and Sun Microsystems, especially for research targeting the asymmetry in media authorship and use. As a Senior Director at Sun Labs, she oversaw projects making breakthroughs in complex distributed systems and data- analysis of multi-terabyte music and video databases. Much of this work lives on in open source and in new companies. The research she led at Xerox PARC, Interval Research and Sun Microsystems created surprising inventions and new uses for digitized language, images and video that helped launch successful spinoff companies. She was also the co-founder of the motion gaming pioneer ePlanet, which partnered with Intel and Mattel in bringing a new, camera-based game category to market. She currently serves on the Athena Center Leadership Council at Barnard and as a director at Golden Seeds. She and her family spend their time in California and Norway.